Congress is not getting its work done. We're near the end of the year, and there really isn't much to show for it. The House of Representatives has wasted valuable time on a constant stream of investigations, and the Senate has wasted valuable time on an endless series of failed votes to pull our troops out of Iraq. And yet there's important work to be done on behalf of the American people. They have not been able to send a single annual appropriations bill to my desk, and that's the worst record for a Congress in 20 years. One of the important responsibilities of the Congress is to pass appropriations bills. And yet the leadership that's on the Hill now cannot get that job done.

They've also passed an endless series of tax increases. You know, they proposed tax increases in the farm bill, the energy bill, the small business bill, and of course, the SCHIP bill. They haven't seen a bill they could not solve without shoving a tax hike into it. In other words, they believe in raising taxes, and we don't. Spending is skyrocketing under their leadership -- at least proposed spending is skyrocketing under their leadership. After all, they're trying to spend an additional $205 billion over the next five years. Some have said, well, that doesn't matter much; it's not that much money. Well, $205 billion over the next five years in the real world amounts to this: $4.7 million per hour, every hour, for every day, for the next five years. That's a lot of money....

It's hard to imagine a more cynical political strategy than trying to hold hostage funding for our troops in combat and our wounded warriors in order to extract $11 billion in additional social spending. I hope media reports about such a strategy are wrong, I really do. If they're not, if the reports of this strategy are true, I will veto such a three-bill pileup. Congress should pass each bill one at a time in a fiscally responsible manner that reflects agreement between the legislative branch and the executive branch.

I again ask Congress to send me a clean Veterans funding bill that we have already agreed to by Veterans Day, so we can keep America's promise to those who have defended our freedom and are recovering from injury. I again urge them to pass a clean Defense appropriations bill, and a war supplemental bill to fund our troops in combat.

I know some on the Democrat side didn't agree with my decision to send troops in, but it seems like we ought to be able to agree that we're going to support our troops who are in harm's way. I know the members feel that way, standing with me. I hope the leadership feels that way, and they ought to give me a bill that funds, among other things, bullets, and body armor, and protection against IEDs, and mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles. It would be irresponsible to not give our troops the resources they need to get their job done because Congress was unable to get its job done.

Remember that scumbag Learco Chindamo, who happens to be Italian, who stabbed a school headmaster Philip Lawrence to death. Back then the UK Home Office rightly wanted to deport this piece of filth back to Italy so he could hopefully die slowly and painfully, but some immigration judge used the Human Rights Act to keep his worthless ass in Britain and presumably live off the taxpayer for the rest of his worthless life. Well thanks to another left-wing fool another piece of filth gets to live in the UK and presumably will live his worthless life off the taxpayer.

Daily Mail - A serial sex offender who admits attacking 11 women has escaped deportation after a judge said it would breach his human rights. The Home Office argued that Mohammed Kendeh, 21, had a "high risk of reoffending" and should be sent back to Sierra Leone. But Sir Henry Hodge, Britain's top immigration judge and the husband of Culture Minister Margaret Hodge, said although the sex attacker had been refused British citizenship and was likely to offend again, he must be allowed to stay here. Sir Henry said sending him home would breach his rights to a family life under the European Commission of Human Rights, and agreed with an earlier ruling that the prolific offender is "one of us". Kendeh's sex offences rampage began when he was 15 - two years after he became a heavy cannabis smoker - and he has also committed burglary, arson and drug offences.In 2005 he was jailed for four years for two sex attacks committed days after he was released early from detention for burglary. Astonishingly he was again released early several months ago. The Home Office last year tried to deport Kendeh, of Peckham, South London, but an immigration judge ruled the move was unlawful. There was then an appeal by the Home Office - but Sir Henry has now ended the long process by saying the he can stay here for good. One of Kendeh's victims, Gabrielle Browne, who was dragged into the bushes and sexually assaulted while jogging in a London park, has waived her right to anonymity to attack the judgment. The senior judge, who is president of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal and a former chairman of the National Council for Civil Liberties (now known as Liberty), has a long record of supporting human rights causes.

Does this moron know that the fellow is 21, he's not 2 years old, is he saying that Kenyans can't survive in their own country. Don't worry about the public, who cares about their Human Rights, who gives a rat's ass about their right to live their lives free of scumbags like this, call someone who cares and hope they don't take too long to turn up, is the obvious message. What would scumbags in the UK do without soft, kumbaya-singing fools like Henry Hodge, maybe one day Henry Hodge will become the victim of one of these scumbags, but I doubt that fools like him can understand the stupidity of his decisions even then.

While leftist morons in the west, whine about peace through bending over and grabbing ankles, online petitions, banning guns and plain old nagging, not to mention hating the US Armed Forces and trying to screw them over at every turn like hobbling the funds they need. Those same men and women in the United States armed forces are enforcing peace through superior firepower.

FOXNews - American warships battled pirates Tuesday who had seized a tanker off the coast of Somalia as well as another vessel northeast of Mogadishu, combined reports said. In the waters off Somalia, the warships reportedly sunk two pirate vessels and pursued a hijacked skiff carrying some of the fleeing hijackers. The crew of the tanker Golden Mori, which was hijacked Sunday night, reportedly fought back and overpowered their attackers, regaining control of the vessel, maritime officials said.On Sunday, the destroyer USS Porter responded to a distress call from the Golden Mori that it was under attack from two pirate skiffs in international waters off the coast of Somalia near the Socotra islands in the Indian Ocean. The destroyer, on loan to an international task force aimed at stopping piracy and terror in the region, responded with deadly force, sinking both vessels, officials said. The Porter's sister ship, the USS Arleigh Burke, reportedly was pursuing the escaping hijackers and providing an escort for the Japanese-owned tanker.Off Mogadishu, the crew of the Dai Hong Dan had control of the steering and engineering spaces of the ship, and the pirates had seized the bridge, the Combined Maritime Forces Public Affairs Office reported. Corpsmen from the USS James E. Williams, an Arleigh-Burke-class destroyer operating as part of the maritime coalition, and a boarding team, provided medical aid and other support as to the Korean vessel's crew. The crew reported five pirates were captured and two were dead.

You know, if those five pirates were to be lost in shark infested waters somewhere, it really wouldn't be a big loss. The world will keep turning and the waters around Somalia would be a little safer, but we know they won't be lost, the Americans will give them food and water and give them rights they never earned, because they are the good guys and thank God for them. I wonder if there are will be videos of this on YouTube, would be nice to see Sam laying bootprints into pirate ass, send a message out to the rest of scumbags.

The Timesonline headline reads: "Saudi King jeered as controversial visit begins"Yeah--jeered by a whole fifty protesters. Way to go, Brits--show the world that you won't stand for some primitive camel-jockey making a mockery of your culture and institutions!Fifty.......!

Eddie Jordan is is the sitting Democratic district attorney for Orleans Parish, Louisiana. He is black. When he gained office, he replaced a whole group of white employees by blacks. The white employees sued and were awarded compensation. That was in 2005 but Jordan has just ignored the court award.

So the employees have just been authorized by a judge to seize all the assets of the DA's office. That seems to have forced Jordan into "discussions" with the lawyers for the employees. Maybe the lawyers really will have to take over his office before this scofflaw DA coughs up.

The Dems sure can find some great candidates for high office, can't they? Who else would even tolerate a scofflaw DA?

If he had been a white Republican, the national media would have been all over this years ago. But they seem to accept from African-Americans exactly the sort of behavior that has made Africa such a lawless place. I can't see that they do anybody any favors by that. It's just another form of racism. They judge a man by his race and have different standards for different races.

Black racist Jordan has resigned and black racist Mayor Nagin of "chocolate city" fame has said that the city will not pay the court award -- so it looks like the seizure of the DA's assets will go ahead. That's black USA, apparently.

LiveNews - A man who pushed a World War II digger into traffic in Riverwood has been sentenced to at least two years jail. Craig Wheatley pleaded guilty to manslaughter over the death of Robert Narramore who died in September last year. Mr Narramore stumbled onto Belmore Road after he was punched and pushed in the middle of the day. He was hit by a passing car and suffered serious head injuries. It was the day after his 83rd birthday.In the New South Wales Supreme Court Justice Virginia Bell described Wheatley's s push as impulsive and loutish. Justice Bell said Wheatley's history of chronic schizophrenia played no immediate role in his offending behaviour. She backdated his two-year minimum term to when he was taken into custody immediately after the death, meaning he will be eligible for release on parole in September next year.

It only makes sense when you think of the criminal justice system as exactly that, justice for the criminal, not the victims. Bout time we dropped this facade about justice, it's a sham, just call it the criminal welfare system and get it over with.

Israeli fuel sanctions against the Hamas-run Gaza Strip punish an entire population and are unacceptable, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said.The EU also voiced concern after Israel began reducing petrol and diesel supplies in response to militants rocket attacks on its territory.Israel says fuel cuts of up to 15% are a non-violent way of increasing pressure on Hamas.

source:In response to hundreds of rocket attacks against civilian targets, Israel reduces fuel supplies by 15% and there's an immediate wave of condemnation!Would ANY OTHER COUNTRY ON EARTH show such enormous restraint? Collective punishment is apparently unacceptable-- unless of course it's those evil Jews who are being collectively punished.Personally, I'd bring collective punishment to a whole new level if a child of mine were to be harmed by these primitive bastards.....and there wouldn't be a Palestinian left alive.

The Australian - PETER Garrett's political credentials were in tatters last night after Kevin Rudd forced his environment spokesman to issue a humiliating clarification of Labor's greenhouse gas policy. The backdown came after a Labor crisis meeting, which followed a day of sustained assault by John Howard and senior ministers on Mr Garrett's approach to a new post-Kyoto climate accord. Mr Garrett started the day by committing a Labor government to signing a new global agreement on greenhouse gas emissions targets that might not include developing nations, such as China and India.

The Opposition Leader had initially endorsed Mr Garrett's statement, drawing fire from senior government ministers, who accused Labor of destroying Australia's position on climate change and threatening jobs. At a press conference in Cairns yesterday morning, where Mr Rudd and Mr Garrett unveiled a $200 million plan to protect the Great Barrier Reef, both men repeated the commitment. Only after Mr Howard and other Coalition ministers began to publicly question the policy, and the media began asking questions, did Mr Rudd, Mr Garrett and a team of advisers hold a crisis meeting at lunch-time in Cairns.

It was decided that Mr Garrett, who had made the initial commitment, should release a statement that "clarified" Labor's position and recognised the need to lock developing nations into targets for greenhouse gas emission cuts. After Mr Rudd had flown to Townsville, Mr Garrett issued a statement to the media, emphasising that Labor's policy was to seek binding targets at the Bali conference for both "developed and developing" nations. Mr Garrett's statement even italicised the "and" to make it clear he was repudiating his earlier comments.

Off you go Mr. Garrett, take your place on the naughty bench with Robert McClelland and the Union heavies, the whip has been cracked folks, comrade Rudd was caught out again, soft on detail, heavy on slogans and one-liners. So the team had to take another one for Comrade. There'll be a lot of gnashing of teeth over on the left over this, but what else can those morons do but watch their Kyoto dreams going up in flames along with all their grand plans to punish cure Australians of all their affluenza. I think Paul Kelly nailed it in Fiasco exposes Labor weakness -

In his clarifying statement, Garrett said a Rudd government would campaign to secure binding pledges post-2012 from both developed and developing nations. Critically, he said that appropriate developing nations commitments were essential for Australia to support the agreement.This is Howard's position.

Howard is spot-on with this. The Queensland Police do not even try to trace car-thieves -- which is probably why Queensland has Australia's highest rate of car theft. When my car was stolen recently, it was recovered shortly after and I found in it an ID card that had obviously been dropped by one of the thieves. I took the card to Dutton Pk. police station but they were not remotely interested. When I complained in writing about their inaction, they said that they had "lost" the ID card concerned! I was thus deprived by the police of the opportunity of recovering valuable contents that had been stolen from the car

Prime Minister John Howard has slammed the State Government for failing Queenslanders over policing. Mr Howard yesterday launched a stinging attack on crime in Queensland and vowed to step in and protect communities. "Law and order should be a top priority for any responsible state government," Mr Howard told The Sunday Mail. "Sadly, the Queensland Labor Government is letting down the people of Queensland by failing to adequately fund basic policing services to protect communities."

But Police Minister Judy Spence hit back at Mr Howard yesterday, describing it as a last-ditch election stunt.

Mr Howard said the Coalition would fund community crime prevention programs, particularly focusing on hooning, vandalism, graffiti and break-ins.

In September, councils in Logan, Warwick and Thuringowa received almost $300,000 between them for closed-circuit TV cameras to crack down on local crime. Mr Howard last week announced a further $50,000 for CCTV for education facilities. sports dubs and community halls in southeast Queensland. Almost $25,000 was directed to the marginal Liberal electorate of Dickson, held by Peter Dutton.

The above article by Darrell Giles appeared in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on October 28, 2007

Looks like everyone's squealing over Kyoto, what do we want - Kyoto, when do we want it -Now!! You want Kyoto, I'll give you Kyoto, bring out the pen, there ya go, sign here, here, down there, initial over there, sign here, initial again and that's just about it, I'll hold on to that pen for you. Pleasure doing business with you comrade, now wipe that confused look off your face and hand over your wallet, no buts, shut it... hand it over or else.

Alex Robson, News.com.au - But Kyoto has very little to do with reasonableness. Just ask the New Zealanders. Our friends across the ditch signed up to Kyoto in December 2002, even though a 2001 National Interest Analysis on the case for ratifying the Kyoto Protocol could not decide whether moderate global warming would be detrimental or beneficial for New Zealanders. Helen Clark's Government ignored this information and committed her country to a program of reducing emissions over the 2008-12 period to 1990 levels or to take responsibility for the difference.

In practice, that means hundreds of millions of Kiwi tax dollars will be paid to former Soviet Union countries, which have been lucky to accumulate carbon credits. The New Zealand Treasury estimates New Zealand's Kyoto liability currently stands at NZ$708 million. This doesn't sound like very much, but this guess is more than double what it was two years ago. At that rate of increase, at the end of the first Kyoto commitment period in 2012, New Zealanders will owe about NZ$4.2 billion - or about NZ$1000 per person.

From the New Zealand treasury website - The estimate of New Zealand’s obligation at 30 June 2007 is $NZ704 million. I downloaded the spreadsheet, just incase they 'misplace' it. I can assure you Australia, there will be a price to pay, and when that day rolls around, YOU are going to pay for it, you won't hear about any of this from Kevin Rudd or Peter Garrett or Bob Brown in the election campaign, there won't be anything about this among the education revolutions, the future, in touch, new leadership and the buck stops with me. That's because it won't stop with them, it'll stop after your wallet. You'll be like the Kiwis, longing for tax cuts and wondering what the heck hit them. But you'll be worse off than them, at least they have Australia to come to, where are you going to go, over to New Zealand? On the plus side, you'll be going against the traffic on your way there.

So has Mr. Rudd got a guarantee from the US that they will sign Kyoto once we sign it, in that display of Mandarin the other week, did he obtain an agreement from the Chinese that they would sign up to Kyoto once Australia and the US signed up? And say we sign the wretched thing, what exactly is Mr Rudd going to do if the Chinese tell him to get stuffed on Kyoto, is he going to send the Australian Navy after them or something? Is he going to tear up Kyoto like he will tear up the IR laws that has brought us so many jobs?

The Australian - LABOR would not expect developing countries to sign up to new binding carbon emissions agreements at the same time as developed ones, Peter Garrett said today. Speaking before the announcement of $200 million to help the Great Barrier Reef deal with climate change, Mr Garrett, Labor’s environment spokesman, said that since most of the heat caused in the atmosphere today was due to developed countries’ emissions, it was right that they should lead the way in international agreements to reduce pollution.

Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd backed Mr Garrett's approach. "If we are to get countries like China and India to accept targets themselves, then developed countries must act first,'' he told reporters. "Australia must show leadership. Australia should use its influence on the United States to get the United States onto the Kyoto program. "When that happens, China then has no excuse other than to act.

Regarding this setting of examples, here in Australia, we don't persecute Christians, dissenters are not thrown into jails or executed, there is political and religious freedom here and it's been around for decades if not longer. I don't believe China has an excuse not to do the same, but they are not, so sorry Mr. Rudd, your waffling about setting examples doesn't wash with me. Personally I believe you can set all the examples you want to but the it won't matter a damn to the what's-in-it-for-us Chinese.

And regarding the grandstanding by the ALP on this issue, I get the feeling they're a bit upset over all this affluenza that's in the West, bit like that rabid hater in The Age that JO posted about a while back. You folks are all a bit too rich and comfortable for them, you need to be taxed and taxed a bit more for whatever cause the left can come up with.

What does the detail-deprived report below tell you? Probably that the attackers were Sudanese blacks. It certainly tells you that the police are not at all keen on catching any of them. There is no mention of the event at all on the police media site -- even though many much more minor crimes are listed there

Police are seeking help hunting down a group of about 15 men who attacked a man with baseball bats and bars in Melbourne's north-east last night. Police said the 25-year-old victim was attacked just before 11pm as he was getting out of a car, in Capricorn Avenue, Doncaster. A group of about 15 men, who had been chasing the car on foot, set upon him with shopping trolley bars and baseball bats.

The Templestowe man had his wallet and mobile phone stolen during the attack. He was taken to hospital with serious but non-life threatening injuries.

Have a look at this folks, about halfway (five-minute mark) through the clip, they're in our midst, calling for an imposition of Sharia law. You're kidding yourself if you think she's one of the few, in today's speak, she'd be considered a moderate. Hat tip Jihad Watch.

Earlier this week Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison took to the floor of the House of Representatives to speak in anticipation of the anniversary of the death of the late Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone. Ellison recalled:

It was a long night, Mr. Speaker, when we heard back the reports as the news reports said that a plane has gone down in Ely, Minnesota, and it was thought to be containing Paul Wellstone and his partner, Sheila Wellstone, and their daughter and several other campaigners. We hoped all night that what we thought might have happened didn't happen, but at the end of the evening, we learned that that tragedy, in fact, did occur. Our worst fears were confirmed when we learned that we lost him, but it was a long several hours before we realized that that tragedy had actually occurred, and we had hoped against hope. I will never forget that night.

However, as Bob Collins comments:

Wellstone's plane took off at around 8 in the morning, it crashed about an hour later, and Jeff Blodgett announced his death a few hours after that. Here's a link to the page I put together at the time, which includes audio from dozens of politicians on the same day....when -- I must point out -- the sun was up. Night? A long night? And the plane went down in Ely, Minnesota, which will come as a big surprise to the folks in Eveleth-Virginia. I figure maybe he was in Australia at the time, but he says in the speech he was to visit Wellstone in the office the same day, so he must've been in the same time zone.

FOXNews - A jury on Friday decided that a woman convicted of killing an expectant mother and cutting her baby from her womb should receive the death penalty. Jurors deliberated for more than five hours before recommending the sentence for Lisa Montgomery. Prosecutors say a judge will sentence Montgomery, but is obligated to abide by the jury's recommendation. Montgomery, 39, was convicted Monday of kidnapping and killing Bobbie Jo Stinnett on Dec. 16, 2004, in the victim's home in the northwest Missouri town of Skidmore. She was arrested the next day in Melvern, Kan., where she was showing off the newborn as her own.

Oh the death penalty, such a cruel punishment, eye for an eye, violence never solves... *breaks off another block of Cadbury Dairy Milk* ...I wonder how long the appeals will take. Anyone know if it's the chair or the needle in Missouri?

Muriel Newman:"With the average Kiwi family being more than $5,000 better off living in Australia than New Zealand, it is no wonder that almost 500 New Zealanders a week are packing up for life across the Tasman. According to the Australian Immigration statistics, 23,906 people who were born in New Zealand settled in Australia during the 2006-07 year. This is a 25 percent increase on the year earlier.

These statistics follow on from the shocking report published by the OECD in 2005 which showed that almost a quarter of New Zealand's most highly skilled people had left the country - the biggest exodus of skilled workers from any developed nation. Some 24.2 percent of people born in New Zealand with a tertiary education now live overseas, compared with only 2.5 percent of tertiary-educated people born in Australia who live overseas.

In this age of easy travel and competitive global labour markets, these figures are a clear signal that increasing numbers of New Zealand taxpayers are no longer prepared to put up with the Labour government’s lie that the country cannot afford tax cuts. With a strong economy delivering year in, year out surpluses, Labour is now spending $20 billion a year more than they did when they first came to office."New Zealand Centre for Political Research

Some of you may have noticed the absence of Rick Giles from this forum for the last month or so. He is not on vacation; he has not given up, or left in a huff. He is in jail, and has been since the 26th or 27th of September. He has been in prison, without arrest, without trial, without legal recourse or appeal, for almost a month. And why? What heinous crime, you might ask, warrants being thrown into jail with no rights, no information, and no idea how long he’ll be incarcerated? Well, the combined crimes of not being a US citizen and misreading the date on his tourist visa.

Rick was asking directions to the bus station, as pedestrians aren’t allowed to cross the border into Canada, on the 26th of last month. Instead of helping, the policeman took his ID, checked his visa, and found that instead of expiring on the 27th, as Rick believed, it expired on the 20th. He was taken into custody, and has been there ever since.

The INS, which is supposed to notify the New Zealand embassy whenever a NZ citizen is arrested, did not. His social worker, whom he requested get the address and phone number of the NZ consulate, got him the contact information for the embassy in New Zealand. If he hadn’t written my phone number on his arm during the few moments he had alone with his stuff, nobody would have any idea where he is. He used his one phone-call to call me, and I have harassed, begged, and bluffed my way to getting his address, inmate number, and all the information I can get, which is woefully little.

I have made contact with the NZ consulate in Chicago, and the Embassy in Washington DC. I informed them that one of their citizens had been summarily tossed into prison for the smallest offense imaginable. You’ll be glad to know that they are using their full diplomatic might on his behalf. They are making a file. They faxed him a letter informing him of his rights, which amount to nothing. They are very friendly and courteous, and try to be helpful. However, unless the US starts to torture Rick, there’s nothing they can do. Apparently the US government can hold him as long as they want, for whatever reason (or lack thereof) they choose.

This is a plea, dear SOLOists, from me. If anyone has any experience with dealing with the INS, or with the US Justice system… if anyone knows anything or anyone who can help, or even give advice, please contact me. I have done everything I can think of, and he’s still there, no court date, no rights, and no expectation of release. I can write letters to him, and send him books, writing materials, and stamps. However, I don’t even know where to begin to get him free.

Retort to a foolwho equates modern ,muslim refugees with WW2 Jewish refugees:"The Jewish populations of any country are overwhelmingly law-abiding and an asset to their societies. The same can't be said for the muslim populations of Western countries--they're little more than incubators for radicalism and anti-Western activists.When was the last time a synagogue was exposed as a haven for hate-sermons directed at the host country? Or a repository for explosives? When was the last time a Jewish bookshop was found to be selling anti-Western literature which advocated murder?I could expand that list into a full post and still not cover all the ways muslim immigrants and refugees threaten our societies and still the multiculti idiots refuse to see what's happening.The doctors who tried to blow up an airport terminal in the U.K. weren't Presbyterians or Catholics yet multiculturalists and lefty bleeding-hearts still speak of "moderate" muslims. Those docs were fine professional moderate muslim immigrants right up until the moment the bombs went off.There's nothing heartless about refusing to import people who are adherants of a proven, murderous ideology. It's commonsense and simple self-preservation. What you dress up as humanity and compassion is a protracted act of suicide."

"By commission and by omission our political classes are polluting both the national psyche and the demographic. When the biomass of parasites and predators, and their appeasers, exceeds that of the net contributors the latter will become the victims of a system of governance that has no other recourse than to bleed them dry. It is under such a burden that the wealth of nations — fiscal, moral, and cultural — haemorrhages away, and chaos precedes the descent into tyranny."Gates of Vienna

"..in this the winter of my years I look out across this once green and pleasant land and I am taken by a consummate anger."Seneca 111 (who wrote the above)

This evening on the way home, I was listening to the radio when I heard some bloke from one of the nation’s newspapers assuring us of a Howard defeat, he was careful to say it wouldn’t be a landslide, but then a landslide is what is needed for a defeat. Well, the polls consistently say he will lose and I’ll admit, I’m not 100% confident, but there are indications that he will pull it off in the end. Labor also admit that they have a huge task ahead of them, they need to win 16 seats and they cannot lose any of their own. Let me get a couple of the things out of the way, the traditional Labor voter is not going to change and many in the young generation are too mesmerized by Rudd and his talk of revolutions and what not. They’re also still under the spell of their loony left teachers who insisted through their school years that anyone-but-Howard will usher in Utopia and social justice. Let me outline why I believe John Howard still has a fighting chance.

That is the implicit message of the academic journal article below. It could even be a correct message. That it is politically correct there can be no doubt.

The Coevolution of Parochial Altruism and War

By Jung-Kyoo Choi and Samuel Bowles

Altruism-benefiting fellow group members at a cost to oneself-and parochialism-hostility toward individuals not of one's own ethnic, racial, or other group-are common human behaviors. The intersection of the two-which we term "parochial altruism"-is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective because altruistic or parochial behavior reduces one's payoffs by comparison to what one would gain by eschewing these behaviors. But parochial altruism could have evolved if parochialism promoted intergroup hostilities and the combination of altruism and parochialism contributed to success in these conflicts. Our game-theoretic analysis and agent-based simulations show that under conditions likely to have been experienced by late Pleistocene and early Holocene humans, neither parochialism nor altruism would have been viable singly, but by promoting group conflict, they could have evolved jointly.

Theory and simulations are a very weak source from which to draw any conclusions about real life but let us say for a while that we should take these results seriously. What conclusions can we draw from them?

Does it mean that all war is racist and that we should therefore refrain from war? Obviously not -- or the overthrow of Hitler would be wrong and that was to a small degree actually an anti-racist war. Wars in antiquity also had very little to do with race. Ancient Rome was led by men of all races, not just the men of Latium. The Roman empire was in our terms quite non-racist. Yet it did an awful lot of wars of conquest and the result is generally regarded as a great spread of civilization.

The British Empire was undoubtedly racist in the modern sense right into the early 20th century. As rulers of the largest empire the world has ever seen (or ever is likely to see) most Brits believed that British superiority was self-evident. But were they "parochial"? They were certainly often and justly described as "insular" but they were not parochial. They were famous as a nation of refuge for the persecuted of other lands (even for Karl Marx) and they did not have completely different rules for insiders and outsiders. Thanks in part to their Jewish cultural heritage (see, for instance, Exodus chapter 23), they believed in impartial justice for all and British justice was in fact at that time famous for exactly that.

Yes: I know that Mosaic justice DID discriminate in some ways between Hebrews and non-Hebrews but it did also stress impartiality and it was certainly the message of impartiality that British Christians got from the Old Testament (Exodus is where those pesky "Ten Commandments" come from). It even led British Christians to see slavery as unjust -- a quite unheard-of notion up until that time.

Indians even sat in the British parliament in the imperial period and when a British army general went over the line in his efforts to maintain imperial order, as General Dyer did in the Amritsar massacre, sanctions came into play and General Dyer was dismissed. At the very height of the empire, the British Conservative Party even made a Jew their Prime Minister -- and a Jew who flaunted his Jewish difference at that. How "hostile" to outsiders can you get?

Nobody would claim perfection for British society of the imperial period (though I personally think it was remarkably good) but it was recognizably at least as fair and impartial as the most fanatically anti-racist society the world has ever seen: The USA of today. So even racist societies may not be parochial and the societies of the Anglosphere today are certainly not parochial. So the "research" reported above is essentially irrelevant to anything but an understanding of primitive tribes.

As we all know, the multi-culturalists will fall over themselves in Dhimmitude to appease and accommodate Muslim sensibilities so they'll pay, it's taxpayers money anyway and leftists never cared much for that. If it had been a couple of Christians suing over something, they'd be told to go and take a jump, homosexuals aren't the only super-citizens folks.

Daily Mail - Scores of Muslim inmates at a high security prison are set to launch a multi-million pound claim for compensation after they were offered ham sandwiches during the holy month of Ramadan. They say their human rights were breached when they were given a special nightly menu - drawn up to recognise their specific dietary requirements - by officers at HMP Leeds last month. More than 200 Muslim inmates at the jail are believed to have been offered the meat which is strictly forbidden by Islam.

The other thing I don't get is, if you mistakenly eat ham or are offered it, why the need for a couple of million pounds, I mean can't you just ask Allah for forgiveness, after all aren't we told ad nauseum that Islam is peace and tolerance? Where does the million pounds come into it, so if they get a million does that mean it's all OK now, they won't be denied entry into paradise. If this the case, what's the point of all this praying five times, beating women, jihad and all that, just jack up the Jizya and pay your way into paradise and buy those virgins. Mmmm.. that's sounds a bit like the world's oldest profession, oh dear, have I touched another sore point!!

eluniversal.com - A forum about the proposed changes to the Venezuelan Constitution Thursday ended up in a fight in the Caracas Pedagogic College. Student leader Yon Goicoechea, who was invited to the forum, was taking the floor when fellow students supporting the changes advanced by President Hugo Chávez hooted at him, preventing him from delivering his speech.The students opposing and endorsing the reform started yelling slogans at each other. Things heated up and some students started punching each other. An explosive device was detonated in the conference room, apparently leaving one person injured. Goicoechea was punched out of the forum. Once outside the auditorium, the two groups clashed again verbally and physically.

"All in all, converting to Islam would be a small price to pay for an end to the killing and maiming of our sons and daughters, not to mention the billions of dollars we could put to better use than fighting this perpetual war."From Pastorius at Infidel Bloggers AllianceThese people aren't misguided, they're not just harmless fools and they're not merely lethally uninformed. They're the enemy within our societies, actively working to destroy our way of life.Surrender is the first option for these people, not something unthinkable or at least a last resort. Sure, they dress it up as compromise or cultural sensitivity or commonsense, but what they're talking about is abject surrender, no less.And they'll happily drag the rest of us down that road with them, given half a chance.

Climate change models, no matter how powerful, can never give a precise prediction of how greenhouse gases will warm the Earth, according to a new study. The result will provide ammunition to those who argue not enough is known about global warming to warrant taking action.

The analysis focuses on the temperature increase that would occur if levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled from pre-Industrial Revolution levels. The current best guess for this number - which is a useful way to gauge how sensitive the climate is to rising carbon levels - is that it lies between 2.0 C and 4.5 C. And there is a small chance that the temperature rise could be up to 8C or higher.

To the frustration of policy makers, it is an estimate that has not become much more precise over the last 20 years. During that period, scientists have established that the world is warming and human activity is very likely to blame, but are no closer to putting a figure on exactly much temperatures are likely to rise.

It now appears that the estimates will never get much better. The reason lies with feedbacks in the climate system. For example, as the temperature increases, less snow will be present at the poles. Less snow means less sunlight reflected back into space, which means more warming. These positive feedbacks accelerate global warming and also introduce uncertainty into estimates of climate sensitivity, say Gerard Roe and Marcia Baker of the University of Washington in Seattle. What is more, they found that better computer models or observational data will not do much to reduce that uncertainty. A better estimate of sensitivity is the holy grail of climate research, but it is time to "call off the quest", according to a commentary published alongside the paper.

That is likely to fuel attacks by critics in the oil industry and elsewhere who argue against investing in measures like clean energy until more is known about climate change. Others say that we need to act even if climate sensitivity lies at the low end of the scale, since coastal areas would still be threatened by rising seas, for example.

Ultimately, the papers also illustrate the limits to which models, even those produced by powerful supercomputers, can help politicians make decisions. "This finding reinforces not only that climate policies will necessarily be made in the face of deep, irreducible uncertainties," says Roger Pielke, a climate policy expert at the University of Colorado at Boulder, US. "But also the uncomfortable reality - for climate modellers - that finite research dollars invested in ever more sophisticated climate models offer very little marginal benefit to decision makers."

In the Utrecht neighbourhood of Ondiep saw riots in the past two days after the police shot a man, Rini Mulder.The man had been fighting with a group of immigrant youths who were intimidating the Ondiep residents on Sunday. They had attacked a pregnant Dutch woman. When police arrived Mr. Mulder raised his arm to indicate that he had called for them.

A policeman shot and killed him. The policeman is a Muslim, like the youth that was raising hell."Fortress Australia

SMH - Disturbances broke out for a sixth successive night in an immigrant quarter of Amsterdam when four cars were set on fire, police said. The unrest started after police shot dead a man of Moroccan origin last weekend who had stabbed and injured two officers. The fires brought the total number of burnt cars to 11, a police spokesman said. The 22-year-old Moroccan had been undergoing treatment for psychiatric problems and had in the past been questioned over contacts with Islamic militants linked to the murderer of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Hat tip Jihad Watch & Fortress Australia Outpost.

LiveNews - The Australian soldier killed by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan has been described as an experienced commander and a hero. Sergeant Matthew Locke was in Oruzgan province on his second tour of duty in Afghanistan when militants opened fire – shooting him in the chest. Sergeant Locke had been in the firing line before last year he was awarded a gallantry medal for outstanding leadership under fire in Afghanistan. The Army Chief Lieutenant General Peter Leahy says he was a true Australian hero. “The Army has lost a gallant and respected soldier,” he said. The news stunned and saddened political leaders, with both the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader paying tribute to the soldier.

I heard most of this interview on Alan's program this morning. I will say this, Wayne Swan sounds like an OK fellow, doesn't sound arrogant or like a raving leftist. However the message I got loud and clear was that he was simply out of his depth. He made brave statements like this, but the reality says differently, I didn't see Richard Marles from the ACTU doing any jumping, we saw Gavan O'Connor huffing and puffing about Labor after being kicked in the ass by the ACTU but then going all soft and weak a day or two after that.

The article below from "The Times" of London gets it pretty right. One point they glide over, however, is that "culture fair" tests (one not dependant on a particular educational or social background) show very similar racial and class gaps to other tests -- and have been doing so for decades. In Australia there was even a test specifically designed for blacks in a black environment (the Queensland Test) and whites still scored way higher on that. Pesky!

Rows about race and IQ pop up about once a decade, and invariably cause a fuss. But do they really signify anything? The evidence is that IQ, as conventionally measured, does differ between racial groups. Many studies have shown differences of about 15 points between the mean scores of white and black groups, and some have shown that Chinese and Japanese groups score higher still.

The counter-argument is that the conventional measurement of IQ is heavily culture-dependent. A test developed originally to measure the intelligence of Caucasians may not be fair to those whose cultural heritage is different. Some tests do contain biases that may disadvantage people, either on the basis of culture or, indeed, socio-economic status. When the scores are corrected for wealth and social position, the gaps narrow.

A second argument - that IQ doesn't matter anyway -is easier to dismiss. A large body of evidence shows that IQ is linked to success in life, both educational and economic. This is why the gap narrows when corrections are made for socio-economic status, because in a mobile society success is largely determined by intelligence.

To some, it is enough to say that IQ tests are unfair, and that their conclusions must be disregarded, but that flies in the face of the evidence that such tests are in fact good predictors of success. So if we accept that group differences are real, do they matter? The first thing to say is that such group differences tell us nothing about individuals. The distribution curves for all groups overlap, and the range of scores within each group is far wider than the differences between them. So even if the group differences were to be real, they tell us nothing about individuals within those groups. To judge individuals by the nation, race, or sex to which they belong is prejudice. Everyone has the right to be judged on his or her own merits.

The difficulty is that campaigners for racial equality have insisted on the rights of whole groups, not of individuals. They have sought to be argue that entitlements should be conferred on individuals not on their own merits but simply because they belong to that group.... Charles Murray, the author of The Bell Curve, a book published in the 1990s that reviewed the evidence dispassionately, said that the only answer was "an energetic and uncompromising recommitment to individualism".

All people deserve equal treatment. But that is not quite the same as saying they are all equal. The error comes in taking a group difference, which may or may not be real, and using it to judge the worth of individuals. That is racism.

LiveNews - An Australian SAS soldier has been killed in a gun fight in Afghanistan. The soldier was on a specialised patrol in the Oruzgan province in the south of the country. It’s roughly the same region that an Australian David Pearce was killed while on patrol earlier this month. It’s understood the Special Forces soldier was involved in an exchange of fire during what’s been described as a Taliban ambush. He was shot once and evacuated by helicopter to a Coalition field hospital but later died.

They give their lives for Australia, and ask for so little. May God bless him, our thoughts and prayers are with his family and mates.

Update - It's understood he is a married father from Perth and was recently awarded a medal for gallantry. Head of the Australian Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, said the soldier had been shot while launching a ground attack on a Taliban “sanctuary”. “We are taking the fight to the Taliban, and it was in one of these operations where we were going direct to fight the Taliban that this casualty occurred,” he said in Canberra. News.com.au

Washington Times - It doesn't matter how many Oscar winners are in front of or behind the camera — audiences are proving to be conscientious objectors when it comes to this fall's surge of antiwar and anti-Bush films. Both "In the Valley of Elah" and, more recently, "Rendition" drew minuscule crowds upon their release, which doesn't bode well for the ongoing stream of films critical of the Iraq war and the Bush administration's wider war on terror. "Rendition," which features three Oscar winners in key roles, grossed $4.1 million over the weekend in 2,250 screens for a ninth-place finish. A re-release of "The Nightmare Before Christmas" beat it, and it's 14 years old.

Nancy Pelosi would have us believe that Americans had stated they wanted a 'new direction' when they voted in that current crop of leftists. As we suspected, most Americans are not in favor of trashing their military, their country and cowardice. She read them wrong obviously, they probably wanted a 'New Direction', one away from failure, but not a direction towards cowardice and defeat. Have a lemon leftists and good on you America.

So were they part of a skin-head gang, running around shooting homosexuals, were they running some sort of violent homo-hating death cult, sacrificing kidnapped homosexuals to the Gods? Perhaps they were indoctrinating the children in their care into hating homosexuals and bashing them late at night, well you'd think so the way the sniveling leftist curs were carrying on. But they weren't, so what was their heinous crime, oh yeah, not toeing the line on the leftist push for the homosexual super-citizen.

Daily Mail (Hat tip Crusader Rabbit) - They are devoted foster parents with an unblemished record of caring for almost 30 vulnerable children. But Vincent and Pauline Matherick will this week have their latest foster son taken away because they have refused to sign new sexual equality regulations. To do so, they claim, would force them to promote homosexuality and go against their Christian faith. The 11-year-old boy, who has been in their care for two years, will be placed in a council hostel this week and the Mathericks will no longer be given children to look after. The devastated couple, who have three grown up children of their own, became foster parents in 2001 and have since cared for 28 children at their home in Chard, Somerset.

Earlier this year, Somerset County Council's social services department asked them to sign a contract to implement Labour's new Sexual Orientation Regulations, part of the Equality Act 2006, which make discrimination on the grounds of sexuality illegal. Officials told the couple that under the regulations they would be required to discuss same-sex relationships with children as young as 11 and tell them that gay partnerships were just as acceptable as heterosexual marriages. They could also be required to take teenagers to gay association meetings. Mr Matherick, a 65-year-old retired travel agent and a primary school governor, said: "I simply could not agree to do it because it is against my central beliefs. "We have never discriminated against anybody but I cannot preach the benefits of homosexuality when I believe it is against the word of God."

You can bet your bottom dollar, that if this couple were a bunch of homosexuals preaching the sins of heterosexuality those sniveling sacks of filth wouldn't have a problem with it, you see some are more equal than others, they're called super-citizens. I said somewhere the other day that sooner or later these SOBs will be pushing for a quota of homosexual friends, employees etc for you lot, think that's not possible, well what the hell is a gay association meeting for then? Be warned folks, there is only one set of beliefs allowed in this world according to leftists, doesn't matter what you believe, doesn't matter if you don't preach your beliefs or action them, your very thoughts are crimes and need to be stifled and squashed.

I have recently been honoured by being included with Iain Hall as the subject of a long tirade from an obscure Melbourne Leftist blogger who can't even handle line-breaks properly. He calls himself The Happy Revolutionary. If he is a happy one, I would like to meet an unhappy one!

Fellow Queensland blogger, Iain Hall has undertaken the tedious task of fisking our revolutionary so I will take that task as largely done. I might observe, however, that the Revolutionary is so obviously biased that he could in fact encourage some people to read what I have actually written -- and I of course think that is a very good thing. One thing in his diatribe that did peeve me was his claim that I have only quoted others in my coverage of the James Watson "African IQ" affair. He obviously missed this.

I gather that part of the Revoltionary's ire stems from the fact that his past vituperation has got him IP banned from commenting here on Western Heart. If any of his brainless abuse pops up on any of my own blogs, I will IP ban him too. I very rarely IP ban anyone but why those whom I do ban think I would tolerate personal abuse on my own blog I have no idea.

Cosma Shalizi is a rather egotistical-sounding young man of apparently Afghan ancestry. He is also an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. On his blog, Three Toed Sloth, he has a long post demonstrating that a popular form of mathematical analysis generically called factor analysis cannot be used to demonstrate the existence of IQ (or 'g' as we psychometricans call it).

His criticisms are perfectly correct. Factor analysis cannot prove ANYTHING in fact. It is just a convenient but rather arbitrary way of summarizing a set of correlations. Factor analysis is such a weak technique that I myself in my more than 200 published academic papers have used it only rarely -- even though I normally present my research results in correlational form. It is my rather severe view that most (though not all) theories in psychology can be substantiated or dismissed with just one Pearsonian correlation coefficient. Anything else tends to suggest poor research design to me. (Yes. I do know about non-linear relationships. I tested for one such in my very first dissertation, in fact).

The sloth is also correct in saying that much of the research into IQ has used factor analysis as a way of summarizing findings. That the findings are not DEPENDANT on that descriptive technique is the point he appears to overlook.

The underlying finding for 100 years or more is that ability to solve one sort of puzzle generalizes strongly to the ability to solve other quite different sorts of puzzle. Problem solving ability is general, no matter how you choose to summarize that. And problem-solving ability is what IQ or 'g' measures.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that verbal ability (as indexed -- say -- by the number of rare words understood) correlates well with mathematical ability (as indexed -- say -- by ability to detect complex numerical sequences). This is despite the fact that many people report being good in only one of those areas. I am in fact one of those who are good with words but shaky with mathematics. Yet I did for some years teach statistics at a major university. I obviously had some mathematical ability despite my discomfort with the subject. And it is the genes too. My son now teaches mathematics at another major university. And at school he was always a couple of years ahead of his class in reading ability too. Pesky stuff, that IQ.

The sloth should rise above his fascination with mathematical processes and focus on the underlying reality.

There is another over-enthusiastic blog here that claims that the sloth "offers an exhaustive demolition of the idea of a single general intelligence factor". The blogger apparently believes that the sloth has magically made lots of large correlation coefficients disappear. One of the commenters on that blog made an excellent point in addressing the common allegation that IQ tests measure only the ability to pass IQ tests. He said:

"If IQ tests are worthless, then so are college degrees. What do they really measure other than the ability to pass college classes? Nothing. Maybe we should assign MDs by lottery as well. I'll let you go first on the triple bypass surgery under your new world order."

Yeah, no bias at all folks, teachers are not shoving their loony leftist politics down the throats of their students, oh no, where would you get that idea from you nasty, negative Conservative haters, how dare you suggest such a thing.

LiveNews - Kevin Rudd’s visit to a Melbourne school has prompted a near riot, with teenagers chanting his name and creating mayhem for the Labor leader. Mr Rudd was given a welcome like a rock star by the YouTube generation as he visited a TAFE school in Melbourne south east. They chanted his name, called out ‘Kevin 07’ and mobbed the beaming Labor leader, frequently dragging him into their classrooms.

Oh my... Kevin07, such a pretty boy he is, all the girls throwing their panties at him, the metrosexuals want to be him, with his shiny, golden, conditioned hair and his slogans and his cuticles are just divine. I think he uses that new conditioner from Elvive, the one with the sea-algae extract, oh he's just sooo worth it. Oh my, what a star and hero he is, talking about revolutions, the future, climate change, all those big questions and he has all the answers, isn't the world beautiful and the flowers so pretty, just need to banish that ogre with his uni-brow. Can you believe in him, in this day and age, doesn't look like he plucks or waxes, huff-puff, he really could use a bit of the queer eye./sarcasm

" A university study shows that as many as one in four New Zealand women were sexually abused as children, prompting experts to call for more emphasis on the prevention of child sexual abuse.Janet Fanslow, from the university's Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, said the initial response to such statistics was shock and horror, but the trick was to move beyond that and think about what can be done to prevent it happening. "source:The overwhelming majority of Kiwi parents are--like parents everywhere--kind and loving guardians of their kid's welfare. I simply don't believe these figures. Quite apart from anything else, it depends very much on how the "researchers" defined abuse in the first place.And this bloody female's comment about "thinking what can be done" for preventing it happening is no more than leech-speak for more government intervention, more demonisation of fathers.Notice that even in genuine cases of abuse, these feminazis very, very rarely speak of the role mothers play in it--unless to claim that the mothers are "victims". Make no mistake, the agenda here is to attack the traditional family and to attack fathers in particular.UPDATE: today's NZ Herald carries this headline:"Maori girls suffer 'horrific' rate of abuseA new international survey has found one in four New Zealand girls is sexually abused before the age of 15, the highest rate of any country examined." It would have been nice if the first report had included that fact, instead of smearing all Kiwis for the appalling behaviour of one race. But Maori are effectively beyond criticism as a group and they're very quick indeed to play the race card the moment anybody points out uncomfortable truths.

"By an overwhelming 81-10 vote, the Senate passed Sen. Vitter's amendment to prevent any funding to foreign organizations that infringe upon the Second Amendment rights of lawful American citizens."Thanks to Fortress Australia.

The attempts by do-gooders to dismiss the evidence against racial differences in IQ are often amusing for their desperation. They almost invariably come up with claims and ideas that have been very thoroughly raked over long ago and are too arrogant to suspect that they might learn something by checking the research on the subject (Rushton's demolition of Gould's "Mismeasure of Man" is a handy introduction to some of the more common issues). In his Freakonomics blog on the New York Times, however, economist Steven D. Levitt has come up with something that is at least original -- though at the price of absurdity. He reports a study in which he studied the IQs of one-year-olds. And guess what? At that age there were no differences between blacks and whites.

The idea that one-year-olds can have their IQs reliably measured is of course a joke and Steve Sailer satirizes it well. Steve does not go the full monte, however, so I will -- thus making me perhaps the most incorrect blogger on the net. I regret if it loses me readers but I have never shrunk from telling the full truth.

The fact is that if Levitt had included one-year-old chimpanzees in his group of infants, he WOULD have found some differences -- in favour of chimpanzees. Chimps grow up faster than humans so are capable at an earlier age -- but at the price of a lower final intelligence and a shorter lifespan. Generally speaking, the higher the final IQ, the longer it takes to reach its peak. If the test used by Levitt had really measured IQ, he would almost certainly have found the white children at that age to be LESS intelligent than black children. Blacks do reach puberty earlier than whites. Levitt was the simpleton for being unable even to form a reasonable hypothesis for his study.

The outrage brigade will have stopped reading by now but I must make clear that I am NOT equating blacks with chimpanzees. Blacks are clearly vastly more intelligent than chimpanzees. But comparisons between primates can sometimes help illuminate general principles. Leftists have long claimed to find great significance for human beings in the behaviour of the "peaceful" Bonobos, for instance. But more on that some other time.

Finally, let me add a routine caveat: People have a tendency to see statements about groups as applying to all members of that group. That is rarely so and is certainly not true in this instance. There is no inconsistency in saying that blacks as a whole are less intelligent while also acknowledging that some individual blacks are very intelligent. What is true of most need not be true of all.

The leader of the Islamic faith in Samoa, Mohammed La’ulu Daniel Stanley, has been found guilty of two charges of carnal knowledge.But a panel of assessors found the 60-year-old defendant not guilty of the other two counts of rape.

The police charged the religious leader after an incident between the defendant and a girl under 12 years old .

Mohammed La’ulu as well is a well-known accountant and auditor who operates his own accounting firm.The Supreme Court will deliver a sentence later next month.RNZNot--to my knowledge--reported here in N.Z. But imagine if it had been the leader of a Christian church--the media would have been all over it for days on end.

Apparently the ALP (Australia's Federal Opposition) are in a bit of a kerfuffle over the death penalty issue again, it would appear no one in the ALP is allowed to have a personal opinion. Everyone has to toe the line with the dear leader Kevin Rudd, use the same toothpaste, wear the same clothes, the same slogans. It's a one man show folks, all that talk about diversity, different backgrounds and what not is BS, a firm hand is what they get, toe the line or else. But it's still very confusing to me, first they tell us, they're opposed to the death penalty, but it's OK for the Bali bombers to be killed, because they are not Aussies, but now that a foreign scumbag has been executed, it seems they're against that again. Maybe they'll qualify it further by saying, it's OK for foreign scumbags to be killed but not for our nationals to help the process along.

Daily Telegraph - "I'll have to admit that even when I saw him wallowing in his own blood and excrement I felt no remorse or pity, only relief. "There was no other way of stopping him.'' Despite previously toeing the Labor party line, Colonel [Mike] Kelly said he had no regrets about executing Gutaale. Colonel Kelly was given the task of re-establishing justice in Baidoa city, in south-central Somalia and said he had no regrets about frog-marching Gutaale, who was found guilty of 31 counts of murder and was responsible for thousands of other deaths, to his execution.

You can oppose killing convicted murderers and sit back and enjoy your latte and feel all warm and fuzzy and pat yourself on the back thinking, how nice am I? You can say, don't kill them, we are civilized now, so just throw the bastard in jail and never let him out. That's well and good over here in Australia if it's applied, but out there in Somalia, there is no status quo, your robes, wig and gavel don't count for squat. Over there, what rules is the gun, is your AK loaded, oh ok, yes sir, no sir, three bags coming up, if he was allowed to live, there are no guarantees he wouldn't be freed one day to resume the work of his dark master.

Major Kelly told the newspaper he personally wrestled and handcuffed Gutaale and handed him over to police. Gutaale was shot dead minutes later. "Before I left Australia I had my own views on capital punishment. I was leaning fairly heavily towards the negative side,'' Colonel Kelly said. "But the death of Gutaale was far more than an execution following a criminal conviction; it was more an act of communal self-defence. "If I was moved in any way, it was seeing Gutaale's mother in the court. She was concerned and upset but, having sat through countless statements from people who had suffered from what he had done, I couldn't have any sympathy for him.''

Again, principles mean nothing to evil, you can issue orders from across the seas in the land of that funny hopping animal, but if you don't confront evil and make an example of it, people pay with their lives. You have to get that son of bitch, stick your gun to his head, then make sure all the other upstart sons of bitches are watching and you pull that trigger and once he's on the ground you put a few more into his body and then tell them to throw his corpse to the pigs and vultures. Having said that, this is not what Mike Kelly did, he just made sure the bastard wasn't late for his appointment.

He said that, without Australia's interference, genocideat Gutaale's hands would have continued. The Sunday Telegraph attempted to contact Dr Kelly several times yesterday but he did not return any calls. A Labor Party spokesman said Colonel Kelly had never supported capital punishment. "It was a personal observation about his feelings following an event that happened a long time ago in Africa,'' he said. "We absolutely follows Labor's position on capital punishment - there is no contradiction at all.''

Most of you know how I feel about leftists, can't stand them, but I gotta tell you, Colonel Mike Kelly is talking a lot of sense, so good on him. Thank you Colonel Kelly, you did the world a favor, you did not let evil triumph, God knows it usually does so I'll take any victory, however small. You'd think they'd want to parade him around for the good that he did, not hide him away and make statements on his behalf, perhaps they wanted that murderer spared. For once Kevin Rudd, shut your trap, let the man speak and let him have his opinion, doesn't mean you have to start executing scumbags, I know how much leftists hate that, just shut up and stand by your mates, this once.

A glorious culture clash took place in Iran recently that made me laugh out loud. The children of Che Guevara, the revolutionary pin-up, had been invited to Tehran University to commemorate the 40th anniversary of their father's death and celebrate the growing solidarity between "the left and revolutionary Islam" at a conference partly paid for by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president.

There were fraternal greetings and smiles all round as America's "earth-devouring ambitions" were denounced. But then one of the speakers, Hajj Saeed Qassemi, the co-ordinator of the Association of Volunteers for Suicide-Martyrdom (who presumably remains selflessly alive for the cause), revealed that Che was a "truly religious man who believed in God and hated communism and the Soviet Union".

Che's daughter Aleida wondered if something might have been lost in translation. "My father never mentioned God," she said, to the consternation of the audience. "He never met God." During the commotion, Aleida and her brother were led swiftly out of the hall and escorted back to their hotel. "By the end of the day, the two Guevaras had become non-persons. The state-controlled media suddenly forgot their existence," the Iranian writer Amir Taheri noted.

After their departure, Qassemi went on to claim that Fidel Castro, the "supreme guide" of Guevara, was also a man of God. "The Soviet Union is gone," he affirmed. "The leadership of the downtrodden has passed to our Islamic republic. Those who wish to destroy America must understand the reality and not be clever with words."

Those of you who follow national politics and who watched last night's debate would have heard the opposition leader telling us, once again, that 'working families' are doing it tough and when John Howard says they've never been better off, it's just arrogance and out-of-touchness (he invented the word last night OK). Most of you will also know Kevin Rudd's always saying, "Can I just say something to Mr. Howard, let's put all the facts on the table". OK then Mr. Rudd, let us put all the facts on the table.

The Age - Offering support to Prime Minister John Howard's thesis that families have never been more prosperous, the left-leaning Australian Institute suggests typical middle-class families "are doing very well" — and has set out to prove the case. Defining a typical family as a couple household with children, the institute has used data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey to expose the true financial accounts of the great Australian middle class. The answer to whether the burden of paying mortgages is suffocating such families, for example, is an emphatic no.

The study defines "middle-class" households as those between the 30th and 80th percentiles of income earned; nearly two-thirds in this category did not have mortgages. Among those with mortgages, nearly 80 per cent of the loans were for less than $200,000 — and within this category half owed no more than $100,000. Among middle-class households, the median mortgage across Australia was $125,000; in Melbourne it was $146,000. Strikingly, only 8 per cent of middle-class households nationally were weighed down by mortgages of more than $200,000. "The usual rhetoric about 'mortgage stress' applies to only a small proportion of the population, yet we are given the impression that most people are experiencing financial hardship," said the institute's director, Clive Hamilton.

"The question arises: why is there such a gap between the healthy financial position of the Australian middle class and the levels of imagined hardship? One explanation is that middle-class households hear politicians telling them they are doing it tough — and they begin to believe it." In a further fillip for Mr Howard, the study confirmed that the incomes of all groups increased in the past 11 years of Coalition rule. The average real income of the middle class rose 27 per cent over the 11 years to 2005-06, and high-income households experienced an increase of 31 per cent. While income inequality in Australia increased "a little" over the past decade, low-income household incomes also rose by 33 per cent.

And I wonder which politician and which political party is constantly telling us how terrible things are and we're all eating from dumpsters. I wonder now, who's running the scare campaign, the mother of all negative campaigns. Maybe Kevin Rudd and his band of lemon-sucking leftists are talking about themselves and not 'working families' at all. Careful Mr. Rudd, no I'm not talking about your taste for ear wax, I'm talking about what you wish for, you might just get it. Spread the word folks.

About

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists. The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Some brief observations about Leftism

As a good academic, I first define my terms: A Leftist is a person who is so dissatisfied with the way things naturally are that he/she is prepared to use force to make people behave in ways that they otherwise would not.

Leftists think that utopia can be coerced into existence -- so no dishonesty or brutality is beyond them in pursuit of that "noble" goal

Leftism is fundamentally authoritarian. Whether by revolution or by legislation, Leftists aim to change what people can and must do. When in 2008 Obama said that he wanted to "fundamentally transform" America, he was not talking about America's geography or topography but rather about American people. He wanted them to stop doing things that they wanted to do and make them do things that they did not want to do. Can you get a better definition of authoritarianism than that?

And note that an American President is elected to administer the law, not make it. That seems to have escaped Mr Obama

That Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian is not a new insight. It was well understood by none other than Friedrich Engels (Yes. THAT Engels). His excellent short essay On authority was written as a reproof to the dreamy Anarchist Left of his day. It concludes: "A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means"

Evan Sayet: The Left sides "...invariably with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success." (t=5:35+ on video)

Some useful definitions:

If a conservative doesn't like guns, he doesn't buy one. If a liberal doesn't like guns, he wants all guns outlawed. If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn't eat meat. If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone. If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation. A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him. If a conservative doesn't like a talk show host, he switches channels. Liberals demand that those they don't like be shut down. If a conservative is a non-believer, he doesn't go to church. A liberal non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced. (Unless it's a foreign religion, of course!) If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it. A liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his.

Death taxes: You would expect a conscientious person, of whatever degree of intelligence, to reflect on the strange contradiction involved in denying people the right to unearned wealth, while supporting programs that give people unearned wealth.

America is no longer the land of the free. It is now the land of the regulated -- though it is not alone in that, of course

Envy is a strong and widespread human emotion so there has alway been widespread support for policies of economic "levelling". Both the USA and the modern-day State of Israel were founded by communists but reality taught both societies that respect for the individual gave much better outcomes than levelling ideas. Sadly, there are many people in both societies in whom hatred for others is so strong that they are incapable of respect for the individual. The destructiveness of what they support causes them to call themselves many names in different times and places but they are the backbone of the political Left

The large number of rich Leftists suggests that, for them, envy is secondary. They are directly driven by hatred and scorn for many of the other people that they see about them. Hatred of others can be rooted in many things, not only in envy. But the haters come together as the Left.

Leftists hate the world around them and want to change it: the people in it most particularly. Conservatives just want to be left alone to make their own decisions and follow their own values.

The failure of the Soviet experiment has definitely made the American Left more vicious and hate-filled than they were. The plain failure of what passed for ideas among them has enraged rather than humbled them.

Ronald Reagan famously observed that the status quo is Latin for “the mess we’re in.” So much for the vacant Leftist claim that conservatives are simply defenders of the status quo. They think that conservatives are as lacking in principles as they are.

The shallow thinkers of the Left sometimes claim that conservatives want to impose their own will on others in the matter of abortion. To make that claim is however to confuse religion with politics. Conservatives are in fact divided about their response to abortion. The REAL opposition to abortion is religious rather than political. And the church which has historically tended to support the LEFT -- the Roman Catholic church -- is the most fervent in the anti-abortion cause. Conservatives are indeed the one side of politics to have moral qualms on the issue but they tend to seek a middle road in dealing with it. Taking the issue to the point of legal prohibitions is a religious doctrine rather than a conservative one -- and the religion concerned may or may not be characteristically conservative. More on that here

The Leftist hunger for change to the society that they hate leads to a hunger for control over other people. And they will do and say anything to get that control: "Power at any price". Leftist politicians are mostly self-aggrandizing crooks who gain power by deceiving the uninformed with snake-oil promises -- power which they invariably use to destroy. Destruction is all that they are good at. Destruction is what haters do.

Leftists are consistent only in their hate. They don't have principles. How can they when "there is no such thing as right and wrong"? All they have is postures, pretend-principles that can be changed as easily as one changes one's shirt

A Leftist assumption: Making money doesn't entitle you to it, but wanting money does.

"Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money -- only for wanting to keep your own money." --columnist Joe Sobran (1946-2010)

I often wonder why Leftists refer to conservatives as "wingnuts". A wingnut is a very useful device that adds versatility wherever it is used. Clearly, Leftists are not even good at abuse. Once they have accused their opponents of racism and Nazism, their cupboard is bare. Similarly, Leftists seem to think it is a devastating critique to refer to "Worldnet Daily" as "Worldnut Daily". The poverty of their argumentation is truly pitiful

The Leftist assertion that there is no such thing as right and wrong has a distinguished history. It was Pontius Pilate who said "What is truth?" (John 18:38). From a Christian viewpoint, the assertion is undoubtedly the Devil's gospel

"If one rejects laissez faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action." - Ludwig von Mises

Because of their need to be different from the mainstream, Leftists are very good at pretending that sow's ears are silk purses

Among people who should know better, Leftism is a character defect. Leftists HATE success in others -- which is why notably successful societies such as the USA and Israel are hated and failures such as the Palestinians can do no wrong.

A Leftist's beliefs are all designed to pander to his ego. So when you have an argument with a Leftist, you are not really discussing the facts. You are threatening his self esteem. Which is why the normal Leftist response to challenge is mere abuse.

Because of the fragility of a Leftist's ego, anything that threatens it is intolerable and provokes rage. So most Leftist blogs can be summarized in one sentence: "How DARE anybody question what I believe!". Rage and abuse substitute for an appeal to facts and reason.

Their threatened egos sometimes drive Leftists into quite desperate flights from reality. For instance, they often call Israel an "Apartheid state" -- when it is in fact the Arab states that practice Apartheid -- witness the severe restrictions on Christians in Saudi Arabia. There are no such restrictions in Israel.

Because their beliefs serve their ego rather than reality, Leftists just KNOW what is good for us. Conservatives need evidence.

“Absolute certainty is the privilege of uneducated men and fanatics.” -- C.J. Keyser

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

THE FALSIFICATION OF HISTORY HAS DONE MORE TO IMPEDE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT THAN ANY ONE THING KNOWN TO MANKIND -- ROUSSEAU

"Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him" (Proverbs 26: 12). I think that sums up Leftists pretty well.

Eminent British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington is often quoted as saying: "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." It was probably in fact said by his contemporary, J.B.S. Haldane. But regardless of authorship, it could well be a conservative credo not only about the cosmos but also about human beings and human society. Mankind is too complex to be summed up by simple rules and even complex rules are only approximations with many exceptions.

Politics is the only thing Leftists know about. They know nothing of economics, history or business. Their only expertise is in promoting feelings of grievance

Socialism makes the individual the slave of the state – capitalism frees them.

MESSAGE to Leftists: Even if you killed all conservatives tomorrow, you would just end up in another Soviet Union. Conservatives are all that stand between you and that dismal fate.

Many readers here will have noticed that what I say about Leftists sometimes sounds reminiscent of what Leftists say about conservatives. There is an excellent reason for that. Leftists are great "projectors" (people who see their own faults in others). So a good first step in finding out what is true of Leftists is to look at what they say about conservatives! They even accuse conservatives of projection (of course).

The research shows clearly that one's Left/Right stance is strongly genetically inherited but nobody knows just what specifically is inherited. What is inherited that makes people Leftist or Rightist? There is any amount of evidence that personality traits are strongly genetically inherited so my proposal is that hard-core Leftists are people who tend to let their emotions (including hatred and envy) run away with them and who are much more in need of seeing themselves as better than others -- two attributes that are probably related to one another. Such Leftists may be an evolutionary leftover from a more primitive past.

Leftists seem to believe that if someone like Al Gore says it, it must be right. They obviously have a strong need for an authority figure. The fact that the two most authoritarian regimes of the 20th century (Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) were socialist is thus no surprise. Leftists often accuse conservatives of being "authoritarian" but that is just part of their usual "projective" strategy -- seeing in others what is really true of themselves.

"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here. For roughly two centuries now, antisemitism has, throughout the Western world, been principally associated with Leftism (including the socialist Hitler) -- as it is to this day. See here.

Leftists call their hatred of Israel "Anti-Zionism" but Zionists are only a small minority in Israel

Some of the Leftist hatred of Israel is motivated by old-fashioned antisemitism (beliefs in Jewish "control" etc.) but most of it is just the regular Leftist hatred of success in others. And because the societies they inhabit do not give them the vast amount of recognition that their large but weak egos need, some of the most virulent haters of Israel and America live in those countries. So the hatred is the product of pathologically high self-esteem.

"With their infernal racial set-asides, racial quotas, and race norming, liberals share many of the Klan's premises. The Klan sees the world in terms of race and ethnicity. So do liberals! Indeed, liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race. Conservatives champion a color-blind society" -- Ann Coulter

Who said this in 1968? "I am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on the Left and is now in the centre of politics". It was Sir Oswald Mosley, founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Politicians are in general only a little above average in intelligence so the idea that they can make better decisions for us that we can make ourselves is laughable

A quote from the late Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931–2005: "You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

A lesson in Australian: When an Australian calls someone a "big-noter", he is saying that the person is a chronic and rather pathetic seeker of admiration -- as in someone who often pulls out "big notes" (e.g. $100.00 bills) to pay for things, thus endeavouring to create the impression that he is rich. The term describes the mentality rather than the actual behavior with money and it aptly describes many Leftists. When they purport to show "compassion" by advocating things that cost themselves nothing (e.g. advocating more taxes on "the rich" to help "the poor"), an Australian might say that the Leftist is "big-noting himself". There is an example of the usage here. The term conveys contempt. There is a wise description of Australians generally here

Heritage is what survives death: Very rare and hence very valuable

Two lines below of a famous hymn that would be incomprehensible to Leftists today ("honor"? "right"? "freedom?" Freedom to agree with them is the only freedom they believe in)

First to fight for right and freedom,
And to keep our honor clean

It is of course the hymn of the USMC -- still today the relentless warriors that they always were.

If any of the short observations above about Leftism seem wrong, note that they do not stand alone. The evidence for them is set out at great length in a MONOGRAPH on Leftism.

You can email me (John Ray) here (Hotmail address). In emailing me, you can address me as "John", "Jon", "Dr. Ray" or "JR" and that will be fine -- but my preference is for "JR"

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)